PARIS, 10 September 2003 — The wave of sympathy felt for Americans in France after the Sept. 11 attacks has been replaced by deep distrust on both sides of the Atlantic, following the bitter diplomatic row over the Iraq war. The conflict between Washington and Paris over the use of military force against the regime of Saddam Hussein revealed like never before, in the tumultuous history of Franco-US relations, two diametrically opposed worldviews.
Just two years ago, French President Jacques Chirac was the first head of state to visit New York in the wake of the devastating suicide plane strikes that killed about 3,000 people. “We are all Americans,” proclaimed France’s Le Monde newspaper in a front-page commentary after the attacks.
On the first anniversary of the tragedy last year, Chirac vowed to help the United States fight “barbarity and the forces of hatred”, assuring Americans of France’s “friendship, loyalty and solidarity”. Also last year, twin towers of light illuminated the Paris night sky in a symbolic tribute to those who died in the attacks, most of them in New York’s World Trade Center.
But since then, the two countries have locked horns over Iraq, and France’s loyalty was quickly called into question in the court of American public opinion, in what a French diplomat called “a moment of collective hysteria”. French students planning to study in US universities were declared persona non grata, US bar owners dumped French wine into the streets and US restaurants — even the cafeteria at the US House of Representatives — renamed French fries “freedom fries”. The French Embassy in Washington received millions of e-mails bashing the policies of President Chirac, whose refusal to back the US-led war to topple Saddam left trans-Atlantic ties in tatters.
Chirac and US counterpart George W. Bush tried to put a happy face on the love-hate relationship at their first meeting after the war, smiling for the cameras at the Group of Eight summit in Evian, France in early June. Detente is now the key word, with Washington and Paris taking pains to highlight their collaboration in the global fight against terrorism and France eventually agreeing to vote in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 1483 on Iraq, despite the murky role accorded to the UN in postwar Baghdad. France has since tried to convince the United States to share the responsibility for rebuilding a post-Saddam Iraq by accepting the idea of a reinforced UN role. But multilateralism “a la francaise” has been answered with skepticism, if not outright hostility, from US officials.
“The administration of Iraq by the UN is a bad idea. Where has the UN succeeded in administering the territories where it has been placed in charge?” top Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro 10 days ago.
The same day, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin called for the creation of a “real international force” in Iraq under a UN mandate. Last week, France reclaimed its role as Washington’s UN spoiler, quickly deeming the proposed US resolution on Iraq insufficient, as it fails to meet Paris’s long-standing demand for a quick transfer of authority to the Iraqi people under UN auspices.
Beyond the divisions over the UN’s role in Iraq, France and the United States find themselves espousing starkly different visions of world politics. “Multipolarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests and, at its very worst, of competing values,” US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in June, in a thinly veiled criticism of Chirac’s stance. In May, Rice told Le Monde: “There were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, I’ll just put it very bluntly. We just didn’t understand it.”
Despite the political rancor and France-bashing in the United States, French diplomats say that bilateral economic relations have been virtually unaffected. And images of thousands of French people cramming the Champs-Elysees to hail US cycling champion Lance Armstrong, who took home his fifth consecutive Tour de France crown in late July, likely helped soothe bruised American feelings.
But according to a poll published last week in the Washington Post, only 45 percent of Americans have a favorable view of France, as compared to 55 percent a year ago. In France, public opinion was split 50-50 on the United States,
